"interesting article on WMD:"

Interesting reading

## Peter Drucker looks at the big picture of the world economy today -- really four economies, he says: information, money, multinationals and mercantile exchange.

For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world's foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation. Though the United States today still dominates the world economy of information, it is only one major player in the three other world economies of money, multinationals and trade. And it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.

## Cy nthia Ozick reviews Joseph Lelyveld's memoir. I haven't read the book, but the former N.Y. Times editor apparently did a vast amount of legwork researching his own childhood. This is Ozick's discussion of the limitations of Lelyveld's approach:

...There is no all-pervading Proustian madeleine in Lelyveld's workaday prose. Yet salted through this short work is the smarting of an unpretentious lamentation: ''If this were a novel,'' ''If I were using these events in a novel,'' and so on. Flickeringly, the writer appears to see what is missing; and what is missing is the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective with its untethered vagaries: in brief, the not-nailed-down. Consequently Lelyveld's memory loop becomes a memory hole, through which everything that is not factually retrievable escapes. Memory, at bottom, is an act of imaginative re-creation, not of archival legwork. ''Yes, I was finding, it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood,'' Lelyveld insists. Yes? Perhaps no. The memoirist has this in common with the novelist: he is like the watchful spider alert to every quiver on its lines. Sensation, not research.

Well put. I think one of the reasons I chose, as a young writer, a career as a critic rather than as a reporter was that I could not see devoting my life to writing that was all "nailed-down." Reporting is a necessary and valuable skill, and I have deep respect for those who do it well; it's hard, hard work, too. But it will typically miss that dimension of "the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective." In American journalism as it is conventionally defined by those who carve out the job descriptions, a critic's portfolio is broader, and it's possible, under the right alignment of stars, to feel as well as to record -- or rather, to record what one has felt along with what one has witnessed.

## Apparently there's a movement afoot in the world of writing about games to be less "nailed-down." It's called the "New Games Journalism" -- "a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player." I'll need to read up. This was sort of what I had in mind 15 years ago when I began to move my attention from the world of theater to the digital realm, and thought, hey, why not try writing more ambitious reviews of videogames? I'd just turned 30, though, and was already feeling that the gaming world was one I would be less and less able to keep up with as the decades advanced. (So right!) So I wrote one opus -- an "experiential" discourse on the world of Super Mario -- and moved on to broader terrain.

Portables at E3: From Interesting to
Awful

this interesting column by Kristof

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Interesting Things to Know about MySQL

Interesting New Tools at PHP Classes

Interesting New Tools at PHP Classes

Hmm... Here are some interesting new tools for all of us.  You should really check out PHP Classes this week.  There are even new classes for Yahoo Calendar and VCard access.  Recommended. 

Interesting Bits Of Panther

Play with Interesting Sites

Here are a couple of third-party services that libraries could take advantage of to experiment with new services!

1. WINKsite
   Alan Reiter highlighted this site today because he used it to transform his Camera Phone Report Weblog into a stripped down version suitable for mobile devices. This free (for the moment), hosted service will work best if your library has a blog because you can feed it the URL of your RSS feed and it will automatically aggregate your content on your WINKsite.

   Like Alan, I was able to create a WINKsite version of The Shifted Librarian in about five minutes. You can view what it looks like in this emulator on a computer or you can go to http://winksite.com/jayhawk /shifted to see it on your mobile device! Although the software will eventually end up being sold to telecommunications companies and middlemen, you can play with it now and add chat, surveys, guestbooks, and more to your WINKsite, and you can even create a pre-fed aggregator of feeds, say for local information for patrons!

   Will your people really use this now? Probably not. But it's fun to play with, you could reach early adopters with it, and it gives you a sense of how social networking, RSS, blogging, instant messaging, mobility, and ubiquity will come together in the future. Price to play: free!

2. Furl
   Furl is a web-based bookmark site that's been getting a lot of play recently and along with del.icio.us, it has been mentioned by many librarians in particular (Library Stuff caught both of them early on). I'm still playing with both sites, but Will Richardson is taking a more active approach:

   "Better yet, Furl lets you create a bunch of different categories for the links you save and then it'll even spit out an RSS feed for each category. Now I knew this was pretty cool when I read it, and I started playing with the idea of using Furl to send cool links to the various departments at my school (since that's one piece of my job description that I never seem to get to.) Well, here ya' go. My newly created English Department site includes a page just for links that is filled with sites that I have "Furled" and pushed to the page via the RSS feed. Again, not rocket science, but a pretty cool new process that allows me to update pages without ever going there. That in itself is a time saver, and the fact that I can annotate the links makes it even better.

   Now, let's take it a step further. Say I share my Furl login with a number of my colleagues who may be interested in, let's say, the campaign of John Edwards. Whenever we come across some relevant info, we just furl the page into the Edwards category and it automatically gets sent to our aggregator or to that special page we've made to archive our research. Or how about this...my school sets up a Furl account, and every browser has the Furl It link on it's toolbar. Whenever anyone at my school sees a page of interest on the Web, they add it to our collective database. Pretty cool concept..."

   So if your library isn't already highlighting new web resources on your site (internally or for patrons), or if your reference department needs a better way than Post-It Notes to share and organize links, give Furl a whirl (or del.icio.us)!

Mobcasting, an interesting idea

Another interesting observation about
parallels between GWB & JFK

seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/November2003_2.html#jrm1583
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Laws from interesting people

Morgan's Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.

Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.

Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.

Interesting new thing from Google

labs.google.com/suggest
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Some interesting Blog statistics

How many people are starting blogs each day? That is a question that the staff at Technorati answered at their first ever developers Salon. The numbers are quite shocking.

- 3,000 a day in January 2003
- 4,000 a day by that March
- 6,000 a day by June 2003
- 8,000-9,000 new blogs a day by September 2003
- 10,000 at the end of 2003
- 11,000 to 12,000 new blogs a day today

Along with those amazing numbers are some others. Very interesting stats to say the least. [New Media Musings]

Interesting TiVO landmark....

The close of Mr. Timberlake and Ms. Jackson's halftime duet drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured, the company says. Viewership spiked up to 180 percent as viewers used TiVo DVR capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again.

US News has an interesting point on Al-Queda: